The use of wireless technology has quickly become an accepted and popular method of enabling communication. Many enjoy mobile devices for the convenience of engaging in conversation from any location. Wireless carriers, in addition to offering voice communication, have begun to provide a variety of content services to provide information from a variety of sources. These content providers, in many cases, extend the capability of Internet applications to the wireless environment. For example, many people access the Internet through a cell phone to obtain stock quotes or driving directions, or use a personal digital assistant to obtain weather reports or access local yellow pages.
Unfortunately, due to several limitations, entering information through a mobile device is generally awkward and inconvenient. Due to the portable nature of mobile devices, most are not large enough to accommodate a keyboard, which makes entering information slow and cumbersome. Also, even after information is entered, it cannot easily be reused. Additionally, information retrieved from one content provider is not easily made available for use by another content provider.
For example, assume that you wish to find a restaurant for dinner and a nearby theatre for a show. Using your web-enabled cell phone, you may browse through a restaurant content provider to select a particular restaurant. To obtain driving directions to your selected restaurant from your current location, you must manually enter in your current location to the restaurant content provider. To find a theatre near your selected restaurant, you must access a theatre content provider and make a second manual entry in the theatre content provider of the address of your selected restaurant. Note that you must enter in the name or location of your selected restaurant even though that information was just presented to you by the restaurant content provider. Further, to generate driving directions from the theatre back to your current location, you will need to make a third manual entry of the address of your current location. Note that it is necessary to reenter your current address even though it has already been entered once before.
This process requires a significant amount of manual entry, as there is no mechanism for storing information manually entered or generated from a content provider for use with another. As manually entering information through a mobile device is a time intensive and repetitive act, it is clearly desirable to minimize data entry through a mobile device as much as possible. However, there is currently no effective mechanism to do so.